For today’s buyer, it is essential to create a great mobile experience. A majority of your customers and prospects browse your ecommerce website through a mobile device.

In this article, I share six techniques ecommerce brands use to optimize their websites for mobile to improve conversions.

1. Increase loading speed

According to Kissmetrics, if an ecommerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year—which means a delay in page response of a single second can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. Additionally, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Make every second count.

Start with a speed test. PageSpeed Insights analyses the page speed and gives suggestions to make your website faster on mobile.

Here are some tips to consider to speed up your ecommerce website:

Compress and reduce heavy images.

Improve the server response time.

Eliminate or minimize 301 redirects.

Optimize CSS and JS files.

Load above the fold content first.

2. Personalize the shopping experience

Offering a quality product or service isn’t enough to drive conversion. When it comes to retaining customers and making sales, you can’t treat everyone the same anymore. As a retailer, give them a personalized shopping experience on mobile.

Ask for permission to access your users’ personal information and their geographic location. This helps you understand their buying behavior to offer personalized incentives and experiences that the users are looking for.

A report PwC stated, “With customers changing quickly and expecting retailers to know their needs and habits and provide them with personalized offers and experiences, the question for retailers isn’t whether they need to change—it’s ‘where to start?’”

3. Use a clear and specific call to action

After creating a mobile responsive website, the question is: Does your website convert visitors and prospects into customers?

How often have we come across mobile responsive websites cluttered with images and text? Finding the CTA on the ecommerce website can sometimes become a struggle. Put yourself in the visitor’s shoes. Where will they go for content?

When designing a CTA, be sure to:

Use clear and actionable language that tells the user exactly what to do

Use enough whitespace to make the CTA stand out and noticeable

Get creative with color, design, and placement

Place one CTA above the fold to avoid any confusion

4. Create an omnichannel experience

Today’s customers are self-directed when it comes to making buying decisions. 40% of buyers prefer buying from an online store with a personalized shopping experience across multiple channels.

Your experience on mobile should be in sync with your experience across social media, email, and in-store. Create a personalized and real-time omnichannel experience for your customers across channels, locations and devices.

A classic example is the Starbucks reward app. The free rewards card lets the user redeem the points while making a purchase at Starbucks. The best part being the card can be reloaded via phone, app, website, or in-store. A real-time working app and a website make the users’ life easier.

5. Simplify your website’s navigation on mobile

Let’s say a customer visits your shopping store. What do you do? You help her to navigate your store and guide her to the section she’s looking for. Right? You make her shopping experience as smooth as possible.

How would you provide the same level of experience to your mobile users?

The answer is: A simple and clear website navigation.

We’re living in 2018, a mobile-first world. Offer a simple navigation experience on tiny screens. Amazon does a great job with its mobile responsive navigation:

What makes the Amazon app awesome?

The navigation is short and sweet. The most important pages are listed first.

There is a search box to customize the navigation for users.

The fonts are easy to read and zooming is not required.

There are no popups.

Users can click where they want without any hassle.

6. Localize the ecommerce website

Localization is defined as the process of adapting a product or a service according to a specific market, country, or geography. Translation is only a part of the process—other elements include pictures, colors, prices, dates, and currenc. The aim of localization is to connect with the users on a deeper level and to improve the likelihood of a purchase.

72.4% global consumers prefer to use their native language while shopping online. The same study indicated that 55% of global consumers only purchase products from websites which provide information in their own language.

When launching an ecommerce store in another country, consider translating the product description, content, graphics and layout into the language of the new audience taking into consideration the cultural sensitivity.

Let’s continue with the example of Amazon.

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Amazon India

Amazon has localized the layout, products, currency, and the kind of ads in each country.

To succeed in the global market, an ecommerce store must adapt according to the local needs. If the visitor doesn’t see what they want when they land on your website, they can easily leave and find another ecommerce website better suited to their needs. The advantage is, when you enter an international market, the possibilities of whom you can target are immense. Market research and an ecommerce localization partner will make the task easier.

Your Turn

Optimize your ecommerce website for mobile and drive conversions from the tiny screen. Which other strategies have helped you drive sales to your ecommerce store? Please share them in the comments below.

Alpi Mantry is the VP of growth and relationship at Translate By Humans. After a 10 year stint at Oracle, Deloitte, and Infosys, she now helps Translate By Humans cater to global brands such as Vogue, Nike, HSBC Europe, and many more.